The Lady and the Tramp (II)

Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers, and the Challenge of Welfare Justice

Bibliographic Data

ID4413872
AuthorsGwendolyn Mink (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume24
Issue1
Pages55
Publication date1998-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0046-3663 • E-ISSN: 2153-3873
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3178618
OpenAlexW2549696007
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited2

I have worked in various political venues on welfare issues for ten years-for about as long as I have been researching and writing about women and U.S. social policy.' Most recently, I worked as a Steering Committee member and cochair of the Women's Committee of 100, a feminist mobilization against punitive welfare reform. I signed up with the Women's Committee of 100 in March or April of 1995-roughly a year after completing a book on welfare policy history and around the same time as the book's publication.2 I have always done both politics and scholarship, so directing my activism toward my field of professional expertise at first did not seem especially odd or problematic. However, I had just published a book critical of experts like me-a book which, among other things, faulted solipsistic women welfare innovators of the early twentieth century for building a welfare state harmful to women and to gender equality. The book was barely between covers, and I had already embarked on a path of policy advocacy that veered disturbingly close to the reformers I had criticized. There I was, consorting with a group of supereducated, do-good feminists, most of whom would never need a welfare check. And there we were, using our social and professional positions to gain entry into congressional offices, where we spoke against reforms that would affect not us but poor women. It seemed to me that maybe I hadn't really internalized the lessons I had drawn from early-twentieth-century welfare history. I struggled a bit with my own contradictions-between what

Developmental psychology · Economic Justice · Political science · Politics · Single mothers · Sociology · Tramp · Welfare · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Law · Medicine · Psychology

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